In January 2013, a Canadian student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver was reported missing, having last been seen at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles. After Elisa Lam had been missing for a week and a half, LA police released this video of her last known appearance. Three weeks later, Lam's body was discovered naked and drowned in the building's water tower, and her death was labeled an accident. Her mystery reportedly inspired Ryan Murphy to make American Horror Story: Hotel.

Anyone with a handheld and a dose of curiosity can launch a ghost hunting web series. But it takes authentic footage, top-notch paranormal equipment, and truly chilling results to yield anything other than an eye roll. With endless pages of supernatural investigators out there, the hunt for the good ones can be daunting. So we did it for you and found the best of the best. Here are the best ghost hunters on YouTube that deliver solid scares.

Just as the Cleveland Museum of Art was preparing for the special Monet exhibit Painting The Modern Garden: From Monet to Matisse, the museum's director of architecture and design snapped this spooky photo of a mysterious figure looking down on the gallery. The "ghost" had an uncanny resemblance to the French Impressionist painter himself, and Kelly Notaro, communications associate for the museum told TODAY that "this snapshot taken by a staff member is not retouched or photoshopped, and we've heard from others that they've seen the man." Talk about a unique way to launch an exhibit.
Though this isn't an *official* ghost sighting, back in 2013 21-year-old Elisa Lam went missing on vacation in Los Angeles. Her body was found in a water tank in a downtown L.A. hotel, and this was the last footage of her seen before she disappeared. (Oh, and still nobody knows how the body got there.) We have to wonder what Lam was *really* seeing in her final moments... This grotesque looking creature is the Aye- Aye, native to the island of Madagascar. These creatures are nocturnal i.e. they only come out at night. Aye-ayes spend their lives in rain forest trees and avoid coming down to earth. They have long witch-like fingers that help them grab small insects and grubs from tree trunks. These animals may not look like primates at first, but they are related to chimpanzees, apes, and even humans. Many locals regard the aye -aye as an omen of ill luck. For this reason they have often been killed on sight. Such hunting has made the aye-aye critically endangered, but thankfully they are protected by law. A young boy is sleeping in his bed on a usual night. He hears footsteps outside his door, and peeks out of his eyes to see what is happening. His door swings open quietly to reveal a murderer carrying the corpses of his parents. After silently propping them up on a chair, he writes something on the wall in the blood of the dead bodies. He then hides under the childs bed.
Little Baby's Ice Cream in Philadelphia makes handmade, super-premium ice cream from 16% butter fat, in addition to vegan-friendly, non-dairy frozen desserts. That sentence is more appetizing than this ad for the brand, featuring an androgynous ice cream person eating itself while maintaining constant eye contact with the viewer. Sure, 16% butter fat ice cream sounds great, but I'm too traumatized to enjoy it.
A modern horror movie so good, it inspired an entire universe of future films including two more Conjurings, the Annabelle series, and this year’s The Nun. The original is still the best, though. The Conjuring is inspired by a real-life pair of paranormal investigators, Ed and Lorraine Warren (played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) who come to help a family whose farmhouse may be haunted.

​Galeopterus variegatus, also named Sunda Colugo or the Sunda Flying Lemur, is a nocturnal and arboreal (lives in trees) mammal endemic to Indochina and Sundaland. These animals possess large membranes of skin called patagiums that extend along the limbs, allowing them to glide along distances of up to around 100 meters; given that these animals are only around 40 centimeters in length that's pretty impressive skills! The mottled coloring of these animals also makes them look a bit like the lichen of a tree and therefore helps to camouflage them.

If you freeze-frame it, you can see that while the thing may be humanoid in appearance, its eyes are badly sunken in, its head and face seem overly large (and awfully pale), and its pupils catch every ounce of the virtually nonexistent light coming from the camera. So, it's either a seriously haggard meth addict with Riddick-like powers who wandered out into the woods of Spain to scream at the talking scorpions living beneath his fingernails, or it's someone in heavy monster makeup. Most likely, it's the latter and the whole thing was staged by a couple of friends wanting to either get on the news or become Internet famous. It's not even that great of a costu- ... wait, what are those, stumps on its back?
New York City actor Joe Cummings made this video capturing what appears to be a homeless woman who secretly lived in his house for an indeterminate amount of time. As recently as July of last year, Joe continued to insist this really happened and is not a prank or joke. There was never another product or release that tried to market itself off this video, so chances are he's telling the truth, which makes it so much creepier. What if there's someone peeing in your sink at home right now? You don't know.
FYI: Bearded pigs use their scruff to dig around for roots, fungus, and bugs to eat. They also snarf down plants, small birds, and the occasional orangutan carcass. (It’s a pain getting the gristle out of your beard, though.) For more chuckles, steal a line or two from these animal jokes that will have everyone in your office howling. *No pun intended.* In this video, we have four kids wandering around looking for a ghost in an abandoned school in Iraq (one description says India, but since they're speaking Arabic we'll go with Iraq). The boys are kind of wandering aimlessly through stairwells and empty classrooms for a solid two minutes, which would arouse suspicion under our "Why is anyone filming this?" rule if not for the fact that we know they are explicitly waiting for the lights to suddenly dim and for a hallway full of disembodied 19th century clothes to start doing the Monster Mash. That doesn't happen. What happens is much creepier:

When they hatch, they quickly infect other local anemonefishes. Parasites, by definition, don’t aspire to kill their host. After all, if the host dies, the parasite loses its home and food source. However, in the case of the tongue-eating louse, some individuals can grow to be so large that the hapless anemonefish struggles to close its mouth. Eventually, as you might imagine, this hinders the host’s ability to eat.

Also known as the Thorny Devil, this lizard has a body covered with thousands of spikes. These spikes are thought to make predators think twice before attempting to swallow a thorny devil. Not only does their spiny armor protect them from predators, it also helps them absorb water in their arid habitat. There are hygroscopic (moisure-attracting) grooves between their thorns. They obtain water from the dew that condenses on their bodies overnight, during rare rainfalls, or by brushing up against dew-coated grass. Any water that gets into the grooves between its thorns is drawn by capillary action to its mouth, allowing the thorny dragon to suck water from all over its body. The Panda Ant is a most unusual species of insect. Their name derives from the obvious resemblance to a panda in its markings. This remarkable insect is not even an ant. The Panda Ant is actually a variety of wingless wasp! Very little is known of this little seen insect. They have been seen to bring down animals as large as cows with only a few dozen stings.
My parents constantly try to explain to me how sick he is. That I am lucky for having a brain where all the chemicals flow properly to their destinations like undammed rivers. When I complain about how bored I am without a little brother to play with, they try to make me feel bad by pointing out that his boredom likely far surpasses mine, considering his confine to a dark room in an institution.
We bought an old house, my boyfriend and I. He’s in charge of the “new” construction – converting the kitchen in to the master bedroom for instance, while I’m on wallpaper removal duty. The previous owner papered EVERY wall and CEILING! Removing it is brutal, but oddly satisfying. The best feeling is getting a long peel, similar to your skin when you’re peeling from a sunburn. I don’t know about you but I kinda make a game of peeling, on the hunt for the longest piece before it rips.Under a corner section of paper in every room is a person’s name and a date. Curiosity got the best of me one night when I Googled one of the names and discovered the person was actually a missing person, the missing date matching the date under the wallpaper! The next day, I made a list of all the names and dates. Sure enough each name was for a missing person with dates to match. We notified the police who naturally sent out the crime scene team.I overhead one tech say “yup, it’s human.” Human? What’s human?”Ma’am, where is the material you removed from the walls already? This isn’t wallpaper you were removing.”
Anyone with a handheld and a dose of curiosity can launch a ghost hunting web series. But it takes authentic footage, top-notch paranormal equipment, and truly chilling results to yield anything other than an eye roll. With endless pages of supernatural investigators out there, the hunt for the good ones can be daunting. So we did it for you and found the best of the best. Here are the best ghost hunters on YouTube that deliver solid scares.
It would (presumably) have to be CGI that was doctored directly onto the security tapes and then filmed on a separate camcorder during playback. Maybe the guard stole four separate tapes of footage, took them home to add the effects on each one and then brought them back to the park to play them on the security bank in perfect sync without anybody noticing. After all, it's not Air Force One, it's Disneyland. How hardcore could security possibly get? Well, they do have four cameras monitoring a single walkway ...
This video, uploaded by British water company United Utilities in April 2011, showed three clips of a maintenance robot running across some sort of creature in the sewers under the St. James neighborhood of London. The internet population quickly began wondering if this was some sort of genetic experiment or just an escaped monkey before someone put together that it was April and United Utilities had a “What Not To Flush” campaign running to educate people about proper sewer usage. Yeah, a water company pulled a viral April Fools' Joke that’s still circulated as legitimate. It only lives on because of how creepy it it.

If this is all an accident of the lighting and their shitty cell-phone cameras, then it was a lucky damned accident, considering they were specifically there to hunt ghosts in what they thought was a haunted abandoned building. If they doctored the video with effects later, then this is a remarkably subtle job. These are giggling teenagers goofing around, and we're pretty sure they gave us a creepier ghost effect than any of the Paranormal Activity movies. So good job, guys -- you successfully creeped us out, one way or another.

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The Ring is one of the few American remakes of a Japanese horror film that not only justifies its existence, but arguably outshines the original. Naomi Watts stars as a journalist investigating a supposedly cursed videotape: whoever watches the tape, which features an extremely creepy series of nonsensical images, will die seven days later. Good luck!

It’s not important to understand exactly what the "deep web" is, but suffice to say that the majority of what we consider "the internet" is just the surface of a vast network of computers and systems constructed by humans. The owner of the Obscure Horror Corner YouTube channel was reportedly sent this game from one of his subscribers who had found it on a deep web Tor page where users could post random files. This "game" was labeled simply "ZK." After running a Malware check, Jamie the YouTuber started playing the game and recording the results.
When a video begins with a couple of guys crashing through the woods at night like one of those "searching for Bigfoot" specials on The History Channel, you can already tell that it isn't going to end well (and that they aren't going to find Bigfoot). That's the case with this video, reportedly shot in the woods of Catalonia, Spain (hence all the Spanish):

There are 18 different species of octopus within the genus Grimpoteuthis which are commonly referred to as a “Dumbo octopuses” due to their characteristic ear-like fins that make them resemble Disney’s Dumbo. These enigmatic cephalopods are a pretty rare sight since they usually dwell in deep waters ranging from 400 meters to 4,800 meters, but the few times they have been spotted has revealed that they usually eat crustaceans and worms. They’ve also been observed around deep sea hydrothermal vents, which are areas on the sea floor where hot and mineral rich fluids spew out due to volcanic activity.

There’s a fish that can eat crocodiles!…Its called the Goliath Tiger Fish and it has only 32 teeth. When your name is Goliath, you’d better be one humongous, ferocious creature, and the Goliath tigerfish (Hydrocynus goliath) definitely lives up to its name. It’s the largest member of the tigerfish clan, a genus of fierce predators with protruding, daggerlike teeth. It’s so lightning quick and forceful that not only will it snap an angler’s line, but it will sometimes make off with his or her tackle.
First look at the Bush Viper, and it’s hard not to think of two creatures: snake and dragon. This one-of-a-kind serpent has an uncanny similarity with the famous magical creature with its somewhat prickly and feather-like scales. However, keep in mind that this animal is still a type of viper. That said, one should refrain from provoking it or else, it will strike like a typical viper.